by Jackson Ford
My legs are jelly, but I somehow manage to climb in. The windshield is cracked on the driver’s side, spiderwebbing out from the bottom-left corner. A smear of blood on the wheel, too. No sign of the driver, but there’s an airport laminate badge on the passenger seat, the photo showing a smiling, bald man in his fifties, with a scruffy beard. Ralph Lorencz. Crew Schedule Coordinator. “Thanks, Ralph,” I mutter, shifting the truck into drive. “Hope you got out OK, bud.”
I wish I could believe that.
It’s less than five hundred yards back to the van, but it takes me a good ten minutes to get there. It’s not just the cracked, chopped-up ground. It’s the smoke, drifting on the breeze and obscuring my view out the windshield, forcing me to drive slow. It’s the other cars, abandoned, many upside down. More than one has a dead body inside, with blood-spattered windows and wrecked bodywork. I do my best not to look, feeling absurdly guilty. Like I should climb out and apologise to them.
When I reach the guys, Paul’s arm is in a makeshift sling. He’s on his feet, unsteady but OK. Africa and Annie are fussing over a backpack, loading it up with a couple of water bottles we had in the van. Snacks too: there are some bags of beef jerky on the runway next to them. I know exactly where they were, in the van’s glove box. Right where Carlos used to keep them, so I could eat after missions.
Fuck you. Not now.
Africa eyes the truck’s broken windshield, looking queasy, but says nothing. The tarmac is slick from the drizzle.
“OK,” Annie says to Paul. “We’re gonna drop you off at the terminal, and—”
“No.” He shakes his head, then winces, his eyes squeezed shut. His hand strays to his neck, rubs it. “You can’t… can’t risk someone commandeering the truck. I’ll be fine. I can’t ride a bike, but I can still walk.”
Africa and I load everything up, leaving Annie with Paul. As I sling my backpack into the passenger footwell, Annie is still arguing with him, gesticulating.
“Teagan,” Africa says. “Please. I must find Jeannette.”
“Dude, Paul was right. By the time you get to Redondo—”
His expression hardens. “I will take one bike. You cannot stop me.”
I bite back what I really want to tell him, which is that he sounds like a little kid having a tantrum. “True. But you know Paul’s right.”
Africa holds my gaze for second. Then his shoulders sag, his huge hands at his sides. “And no list, huh?”
“What?”
“On the plane. You say Mister Germany not have the list.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“I think I might be in trouble,” he mumbles. “With Paul, you know? He and Reggie wanted me to stay with the van, but when things went bad for you on the plane, I just think, maybe I can help.”
“Don’t even worry about it.”
He continues like I hadn’t spoken. “You back me up, huh? If I get in trouble?”
“What?” I’m barely listening. “Oh. Sure. Whatever.”
“Thanks. I really don’t want—”
“Annie!”
Paul’s shout is ignored. Annie walks away from him, not looking back, face set as she climbs into the truck.
I waver, not sure what to do. After a moment, Paul’s shoulders sag. His bald head gleams in the wet.
He walks up to us, moving gingerly, like he’s walking on broken glass. When he leans in the window, his face is very pale.
“Nuclear Bikes, on Valerio Street,” he says, addressing me. “Just head west out the airport – you’ll find it. I’ve given Annie my ex-wife’s number – make sure she calls it from the office, OK? Let her know I’m fine.”
Annie, in the backseat, doesn’t look at him.
I chew on my bottom lip, not wanting to leave him there. “Can I not at least give you a ride to—?”
“No. We can’t risk a first responder taking the truck. I’ll be fine – just go.”
This sucks.
But it doesn’t stop me from giving him a wave, clambering into the truck and heading to the western edge of the airport. In the rear-view mirror, Paul stands alone, a dwindling silhouette in the rain.
TWENTY-TWO
Teagan
Whoever Crew Schedule Coordinator Ralph Lorencz is – or was – he had good taste in trucks.
The F150 is clunky but powerful, and we manage to cross the tarmac without too much trouble. The truck mounts the torn-up sections easily, although I have to steer it around several of the larger cracks. I’m worried about getting past the airport fence, unable to stop thinking of armed guards, alarms, landmines, whatever hell else the TSA protects airports with.
It turns out not to be a problem. Because the fence isn’t there any more.
It’s worse outside the airport. There, things were spread out – the broken planes and broken buildings were far enough apart that it felt like I could ignore them. Here? It’s zombie apocalypse. Nuclear winter. Day of the dead. Broken buildings, sirens, burst water pipes, downed power lines spitting like firecrackers. The few people we see look barely alive: covered in dust and blood, with dazed looks, as if they’ve just woken from a long sleep.
That same feeling again: total helplessness. There is no way – at all, ever – that a single human being caused this. No freaking way. I don’t believe it.
It’s around one-thirty by the time we reach the bike store, which is exactly where Paul said it would be. Most of it, anyway. Like just about every other building we pass, it’s collapsed in on itself – not helped by the fact that an electric pole has crashed right through the ceiling.
I snag us three bikes out of the rubble, winding my PK inside the wrecked building and pulling them out. I have to psych myself up to do it; there’s that same hitch, the same almost-physical resistance against using my powers. Not in public. Then again, the few people I do see aren’t paying attention to us anyway. At the far end of the block, a woman wanders in uneven circles, staring at the sky like it’s changed colour.
The bikes are identical black BMXs, with balding tyres and slightly rusty gears. Even after I get them onto the sidewalk, I can’t help feeling anxious – like Tanner herself is going to step out from behind a building and whisk me away to a black site lab.
“Keep an eye out,” Annie says. It’s the first words any of us have spoken since we left Paul.
“For what?” Africa asks, shrugging on his backpack. He straddles the bike – it’s way too small for him, making him look like something out of a circus.
Annie swings her leg over. “Everybody else. Bikes are gonna be hot property.”
“I can’t get Google Maps.” I cycle my phone to airplane mode and back, hoping against hope. Google Maps is an excuse. It’s Nic I want to get hold of. I keep thinking of how he yanked me under the table during the first quake, back at my apartment. That instinctive, unquestioned move to protect me.
My apartment. Gone, probably. Vaporised, sucked down into the earth, felled by a power line. The thought doesn’t make me feel anything. Maybe I’m in shock, too.
“Don’t need GPS,” Annie says. “I know the way. Let’s go.”
It hurts to leave the truck. It feels like rejecting a gift. More than that: it was warm inside the truck. Dry. Outside, the rain that started up while I was in Schmidt’s plane has gotten heavier, drops spattering my skin. But Paul was right – we’ll get nowhere on the 405 in a regular car.
I leave the keys in the truck’s ignition. Maybe someone else can make use of it. I also pull a few more bikes out of the wreckage of the shop, leaving them on the sidewalk. Somehow, I don’t think whoever runs Nuclear Cycles is going to mind.
The 405 doesn’t actually start until you get of the Valley. We have to go through the Sepulveda Pass first – a kind of chokepoint through the Santa Monica Mountains. By the time we reach it, I’m both freezing and out of breath. We’re riding right into the rain, and it soaks me to my skin, which is already drenched in sweat. I can’t find a rhythm on the bike. The constant changes in the t
errain and the cracks in the road surface make for hard going.
There are more people the closer we get to the Pass. The entry ramp, at the south edge of the Sepulveda Basin, is choked with cars – many of them with their front or rear pointed skyward, half-swallowed by cracks. One or two of the cars are on fire, slowly being consumed by flames.
“Ayo,” someone shouts as we pass – an enormously fat man with a white T turned transparent from rain. “Where’d you get the bikes?”
“Up on Valerio,” Annie replies. “In Balboa.”
“Y’all got anything to eat?” he fires back. She doesn’t reply to that – just peddles harder, pushing her bike up the on-ramp, weaving between abandoned cars.
The man doesn’t follow us. Neither does anybody else. I guess we haven’t reached full-on apocalypse-looting stage yet. The thought is cynical, way too bitter. Should I share some of the water in my backpack with these people? I stop myself just in time. As much as I want to help, it’s too risky. Someone might decide to snatch our bikes, or all of our water. A confrontation right now is the last thing we need.
Thank fuck the freeway isn’t elevated, or it would have collapsed completely. Paul was a hundred per cent right about the bikes. There’s a ton of traffic, cars and trucks blocking the road in all directions, but weaving between them isn’t too tricky. Ahead of us, Annie hunches over her handlebars, and Africa looks miserable. I’m shivering now, blinking away the steady rain.
Holy fuck. In a weird way, like with the last quake, I think we got lucky. It’s all too easy to picture this happening in the fall at the height of fire season – a thousand small blazes blossoming as the quake ripped open gas mains, the fires fanned by the winds, consuming everything.
The thought gives me another jab of nausea. My parents were killed in a fire at our farm in Wyoming. The fire was set by my brother Adam. He died too, along with my sister, Chloe. The only reason I escaped was because I’d been outside, chopping wood. I’ve made it a point to avoid fires since then. It hasn’t always worked – I had to fight Jake, the only other psychokinetic I’ve ever met, in the middle of one last year. It was exactly as much fun as it sounds. The thought of a quake, followed by a city-wide firestorm, is too awful to think about.
Then again, it’s not like what we have now is much better. The crowds get thicker the further south we get, people milling in large groups at the edge of the highway. Everybody seems to have a wound of some kind: a broken arm or leg, a bloody nose, a gash in a shoulder or hip. Even the ones who escaped injury look dull, exhausted, watching us pass with slack expressions.
Some of the dead are under blankets. Most aren’t. I do my best not to look at them – just keep peddling, I tell myself, keeping my head down, making myself breathe. I’m in agony, my thigh muscles burning, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about. Well, I could stop peddling, but that would strand me on this highway, this junkyard of broken cars and broken people.
I pull out my phone again as we peddle, desperate for signal. Zip. Nada. Dick-all. And – holy fuck, it’s almost two-thirty. Have we really been peddling for an hour already? I feel like we’ve gotten nowhere.
It’s not long before we hit something even the bikes won’t help with. As we reach the southern end of Bel Air, the freeway tops an overpass. One which has collapsed in on itself, cutting off the road ahead. Annie comes to a halt, looking left and right, then abruptly peddles for the side of the freeway. She dismounts, lifting her bike and clambering over the barrier onto the hard shoulder.
“Um, Annie?” I say. “Where are you going?”
She vanishes over the other side. I take a breath, biting back against the stitch in my side, then do the same. Africa follows, mute and shivering.
Turns out, Annie knows what she’s doing. There’s a road on the other side of the embankment, a smaller one, winding up into the hills. It’s not easy to get to – we have to scoot down on our backsides, awkwardly holding the bikes. Africa manages better than we do, his long legs spidering down the slope. By the time we reach the broken tarmac, we’re all covered in freezing mud. There’s a building on the hill above us. A huge, white structure, towers and domes and angular blocks, like a hospital designed by a crazy person.
“Getty Center,” Annie mutters.
“Uh-huh.” Africa brightens for a moment, before his face drops back into its dull, sullen stupor.
I know the Getty, but I’ve never been inside. It’s an LA landmark – a massive art museum, high above the city. I get a better look at it as we bike up the road, my thighs straining against the steep gradient. It’s hard to tell from here, but it looks like it survived the quake. The thought actually cheers me up a little – until we crest a rise at the base of the Center.
Africa lets out a horrified breath. I can’t even do that. All the air has been sucked from my lungs.
There was terrible movie about an earthquake I saw once – San Andreas, maybe. The movie, whatever it was, had this one shot of a huge, miles-wide section of Los Angeles tilting up and sliding into the Pacific.
It was an amazing shot. I mean, it was a very stupid one – the kind of thing best experienced with popcorn and several beers and a bunch of friends who don’t mind yelling drunken comments at the screen – but still amazing.
That shot has nothing – nothing – on the view from the Getty Center right now. Beyond the fact that it makes me wish I really was black-out drunk.
From here, we can see the whole of Los Angeles, from the Westside to Downtown. I saw a tiny bit out of the window of Schmidt’s plane, but that was like watching a movie on a phone. This is IMAX, with Dolby Surround and 3-D picture.
The city hasn’t slid into the Pacific. Instead, it looks as if a giant ripped the whole of LA up from the bedrock, then let it crash back down. Fires everywhere, smoke growing like tumours. Torn buildings, toppled trees. A freeway – the 10, I think – wrenched from its supports, which stick up from the ground like broken teeth. Several of the skyscrapers in downtown are gone, and the usual rumble of the city has been replaced by a thousand distant sirens. Helicopters hover everywhere, like flies buzzing around a corpse.
How could they build a city here? How can a million people live right over a fault line and act like that’s normal?
Annie’s voice is steady. “Let’s go.”
We descend, the road winding alongside the freeway, and rejoin it just where it crosses Wilshire Boulevard. This time, it’s different. People are moving, not standing in small groups, all of them marching south. Ahead of us, there’s an Army truck, soldiers with assault rifles waving people past, yelling instructions at each other. They look exhausted, overwhelmed.
News choppers buzz overhead. It’s kind of unbelievable they haven’t collided. Then again, maybe that’s already happened, and I just haven’t noticed.
You know what gets me? Nobody’s really talking. Everybody’s quiet. I didn’t notice it before, but the further we go, the more it bothers me. I guess with something this big, there’s nothing to talk about. There’s no story to tell – not when everyone around you is living through it too. Telling stories can come later. Right now, it’s just about getting out.
“Where you headed?” I ask a woman, as I peddle alongside. She’s young, carrying a little girl in her arms, leading another by the hand. The walking girl looks stoned. She’s got a black eye, a healthy purple shiner. Like someone socked her.
“Dodger,” the woman says, distracted.
“What?”
“Dodger Stadium. There’s a camp there, I think.”
She’s barely paying attention to me. I accelerate, ignoring the flare of pain in my thighs, pulling in alongside Annie and Africa. When I tell them where the crowds are going, Annie frowns. “We should get back off the freeway. Last thing we need is to get caught up in all that.”
“What’s happening at the stadium?” Africa asks.
“That’s where FEMA’ll be. My guess is they probably don’t want it to be another Katrina situation,
so they’ll be on this quick.”
“Will it make a difference?” I say.
“Fuck if I know, man. But LA makes a whole lot more money for America than New Orleans ever did.”
Cold. Also true.
There’s got to be something I can do to help. Find Reggie, sure, maybe even find Nic, but after? Am I just going to sit around an emergency camp somewhere? See if my house is still standing? Nic was right. I can help, and I should be out there doing it.
Except: how much help could I be, really? I’m strong. I can lift concrete and cars. But how long will it be before word gets out about what I’m doing? What happens then? It’s the same worry I had back in Leimert Park, on the night of the first quake – only worse. Way worse.
And even if I did do all those things, what happens after? When the quake starts to become ancient history, when the people of LA return to their lives – either here, or somewhere else? What will Tanner and the nameless agency she works for do about me?
Of course, I already know the answer to that one.
We slip away from the freeway, peddling further south into Sawtelle. It used to be a pretty nice area: decent bungalows, small apartment blocks, trees and Priuses. It’s a wasteland now. It’s even worse because this is where Nic lives – his apartment is on Westholme, to the north-east. He probably won’t be there, but it doesn’t stop an urge to turn tail and peddle like hell. I’m not even sure I’d make it: my feet are completely numb. Fingers, too. I have to grind my teeth together to stop them from clacking.
Annie takes us down Cloverfield Boulevard. At the point where it crosses Olympic, she pulls up. We’ve been pedalling for a couple of hours now, and my legs are more than happy to let me know it.
“Everything OK?” I say, trying to stop my voice from shaking with cold.
“Just thinking.” She points. “We should head for the pier. We can take the boardwalk down to Venice – there won’t be as many cars.”
Strange. She didn’t need to stop and tell us that. Africa and I have been blindly following her for a while now. Then I look closer – she’s exhausted, too, bent over the handlebars. She wanted an excuse to rest, and is trying not to show it.
